Tips to get started

Attracting birds to your new bird table is easy, and we have a few simple tips to ensure you and your garden visitors have the best experience. Offering a wide range of bird food will encourage more birds to visit your garden; some may even become regulars, and a few may choose an area of your garden to call home.

Bird table hygiene is important

Keeping a bird table clean is as important as regularly checking that the bird food is not spoiling and is free from mould. The same applies to any bird-feeding product; ensuring it’s clean and hygienic is one of the most important things you should do!

We recommend cleaning your bird table at least once weekly. A regular cleaning schedule will avoid any build-up of old food and will enable you to remove any dirt, debris or half-eaten food that may be left behind – this can often lead to bacteria and mould growth that can cause birds' sickness and disease.

By doing this, you are feeding birds safely, and it helps you decide which foods they love and what they are leaving behind.

Keep an eye on bird food quantities

When you start putting food on a new bird table, it can be hard to determine how much you should put out. Of course, knowing how much is too much, or how little food to leave out for wild birds is useful, and knowing where to start can seem like a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be! Check out our do's and don'ts of bird feeding for more advice.

To make this easier, we recommend offering only a few small handfuls of food at first. Then, keep an eye on the bird table for the next few days to see how much they are eating or leaving behind. You might find they have consumed all of it, or a lot may still be left behind. It’s worth noting if you are new to feeding birds, it may take a little time for a wider range of birds to find your food source, but this will even out over time.

Place your bird table in a safe and sheltered area

Another thing you should consider is where to place your bird table in your garden. The ideal place in your garden is a balance between somewhere you can see them feeding while giving them clear visibility in all directions. If you take this into consideration, you will get the benefit of being able to watch them eat in peace, and they can feed more securely and quickly escape if they spot a threat.

There are many bird table designs and styles to choose from; they vary in height, and some have a roof while others don’t. For example, our Bird Platform is a traditional flat-top bird table suitable for all garden birds of all shapes and sizes. However, it comes without a cover, so you must be sure to place it in an area of your garden out of direct sunlight. Also, consider choosing to put it in a sheltered area to protect the bird food from wind and rainfall.

For comparison, our Bird Inn bird table has a cover that will protect bird food from the elements. The benefit of this design is that they are more suited to smaller garden birds like tits, starlings, finches, robins, and other songbirds. Many larger garden birds cannot fit under the roof and will seek food elsewhere instead.

Attracting birds to a new bird table is easy

As you can see, attracting birds to your new bird table only takes a pinch of effort. It comes down to keeping their feeding table clean, how much to feed them, knowing what food wild birds prefer and ensuring the food on offer is fresh, healthy and beneficial to their diet.

Figuring out what food birds prefer will encourage them to return and become regular visitors – and you may even feel they are part of the family. Seeing birds in your garden, getting to know their behaviours, and identifying different species is one of the best things about bird feeding, but the fun doesn’t stop there!

To see even more activity in your garden, you should consider providing a bird home for a few of them to nest in. And since nesting season is never far away, now is the best time to think about where to place your bird house so they can start a family in your garden.